


The Full Moon and a Glimmer of Dawn

by DinosaurTheology



Series: Black Leather and Pink Lace [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Assault, Crime Fighting, Gen, Heroism, Hospitalization, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 03:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5769421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy gets her man, but takes a lump or two (or ten) getting him. She's a little bit broken, but she'll be back. After all, even when the night is at its darkest there's a glimmer of light and the promise of dawn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Full Moon and a Glimmer of Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Brooklyn 99 isn't mine but I just discovered it and I like it. Amy is... well, she's me, pretty much. Driven, approval seeking, all that good (and bad!) stuff so I really feel her. For such a funny show, too, there's enormous dramatic potential... it's why crime dramas are so popular. Plus, looking up all the NYPD lingo was super fun.

Amy Santiago takes a pretty good whipping for it, but she gets her man. She almost always does. That's The Job, right? She's been doing this a few years now, is actually pretty damned good at it to the surprise of seven brothers--from time to time herself--and isn't about to let some skell give her grief she hasn't earned.

Randy Daily isn't really much, either, just a low-level hairball that a lot of them have picked up before on one thing or another. Even Hitchcock has collared the guy in the past, for God's sake. He's usually pretty mellow, ready to throw his hands up, wear the bracelets and spend a few hours chilling in the cage. He's small-time but he knows people, has no ambition of his own apart from staying out of what he calls real, grown-up jail and isn't shy about ratting his fellow mokes out for a good deal and a dollar or two.

Sometimes, though, even the most timid mouse gets a wild hair. He's in a bad mood, has done something serious he doesn't want you to know about, or has dropped something heavy that's got him in a piss-up-a-rope mood. So when Daily throws himself at her she's not quite ready, just manages to call 10-13 on her radio, can't get her gun out and hits the ground rolling with him.

It is manifestly, magnificently not like DT classes at the Academy. He's bigger than her, strong in the way a drunk or duster is sometimes, and seems to have grown nine or ten extra arms. It's like fighting a freakin' Hindu god. Her weapon arm is pinned; the Glock 19 on her hip might as well be on the moon. His fists work, then his elbows and knees. They connect with meaty thuds, explosions of pain she can't quite grasp are on her own torso and face. She gets her taser out, though (it's on her other side, just like her dad said, never put all your eggs in one basket) and feeds him enough juice to change a bull elephant's mind. He dances, jerks and then slumps like a lover who's spent up all his energy. The thought stays with her and it's a long, long time before she can get intimate with a man again.

His teeth, still locked in her shoulder, take away a little skin and meat during all this, but not nearly as much as they would have on bare flesh. Terry, who answers her call--she vaguely remembers him bellowing for a bus--thought it was much worse than it was, that they were about to lose one of their own in the line. He lifts her like a doll, or one of his babies. She can see her blood on his yellow, pressed shirt. Things were grey, then, and after that black for a while.

It's funny, when she wakes up at Cedars, what she can and cannot remember. Daily is going down hard for assaulting an officer and has decided to take a deal--as always--selling out a few of his scum friends and cousins for a few years off the hitch. That's for the best, their all knowing DA has decided. She won't have to testify. It's galling, just a little. Any other case and he'd be hard as nails, expect her to be, too. Now he's treating her like a glass unicorn, like... a victim.

It really, really sucks.

Not as bad as the half dozen cracked ribs, broken orbital and ankle in a few more pieces that it was ever meant to be. Her face feels big and swollen, like she's gained a hundred pounds overnight. Something in her side is tender, too, but she isn't with it enough to put two and two together--her mom is talking to the doctor, instead of her, like back when she was a kid--until Detective Scully visits her a day or two later.

"Hey," he says, quiet and sort of morose. He's got a bunch of balloons in one hand and a stuffed red thing--maybe a heart--in the other. "I just wanted to stop by and say hey and that I'm sorry. I really, really am. I'm sorry that I fell on my butt and hurt my butt and you got beat up like that. I'm glad that Terry answered your 10-13 first and not mine, so maybe it's good I forgot to turn my radio on." He ties the balloons to her bedrail. "I know you like balloons, so I got you those. They're lots of colors. I know you like colors, too. I got you this spleen, too, since you don't have one anymore." 

He offers her the red, stuffed thing. That she can't take it is more upsetting than the dimly realized fact that, hey, she doesn't have a spleen. Ah, well... wasn't using it, anyway. Also--where in hell did Scully get a stuffed spleen? Hospital gift shops, man, hospital gift shops. When he realizes, finally, that her fine motor control is nonexistent, he tucks the plush organ down by her side with callused, gentle hands. She remembers, offhanded, that he has two children that do not speak to him. Maybe the 99's younger detectives have replaced them, in the big guy's mind? Could Terry ever worry that he will be so estranged from Cagney and Lacey?

These aren't comfortable thoughts and her face hurts, along with everything else, so Amy lies still and tries to sleep. It works more or less. She drifts, doesn't know what's real or a dream, doesn't know if the Captain's visit is something to be excited about when she remembers it or just something for her bedside journal. Could be either, who really knows. She does know that the painkillers are good; Morphine Amy and Five Drink Amy might be sisters, are definitely from the same neighborhood, and get along just fine.

Recuperation is hard work. Physical therapy isn't much fun, and flinching at loud noises even worse. She can't watch any of her old, favorite cop movies or and even the news can bring beads of sweat to her forehead, cause her heart to pound. The world seems to shrink, during those days. Her mom's there to hold her when that happens, and Jake calls every night. He's visited once or twice, but has never been at his most reliable when things are real, raw and bleeding on the inside. He tries, though, which means more to her than she can easily say. Someone that might or might not have been Doug Judy leaves a very nice fruit basket and bottle of wine. They do not go unappreciated.

She gets her commendation medal a month or so later, when she's out of the hospital and more or less presentable for the press and brass. The infamous Peanut Butter, now a lieutenant, isn't around to hog her glory. She'll be a detective first grade, after this, and then it's just a short hop, skip and jump to sergeant, lieutenant, captain, deputy-chief... she'd wriggle with excitement but the thought hurts too much.

Rosa's there to help her, mistakes the gesture for one of pain. "You hurting or just weird?"

"A little of both," she says. "Just hard to get comfy."

"Casts suck.

Amy's brow furrows. "You've been in one, too?"

"No. Put a lot of people in em." She smiles. "They seemed to hate it." Something catches her eyes. She stands in front of the smaller woman, slides off her cap, and brushes an errant hair behind her ear. The casual intimacy of the gesture causes something to catch in Amy's throat; she shivers.

Those huge eyes, dark like unknowable galaxies, bore through hers into the deep, soft spots of her brain. The lush smell of coconut and mango swirl off her shimmering hair, so black that it gleams purple in high light, along with Red by Giorgio. She's close enough that her cinnamon gum wafts across the space between them, close enough to kiss.

It's an intimate instant stretching towards eternity. The heat death of the universe could not break this spell. "You're a good police, Santiago. Don't let this shit get in your head. You'll get fruitier than you are. Then you won't be good police; you'll be Scully and buy people stuffed spleens."

She tries to think of something, manages to come up with, "It's the thought that counts, isn't it?"

"No. Not if the thought's stupid. That one was." She offers a rare, genuine smile that doesn't come along with fantasies of justly meted out police brutality. "We need you back. I've been catching with Hitchcock for three weeks, now. It's grim."

"Really?"

"We were heading to a 10-30 the other day. He asked me to go 63 so that I could lotion his back. His vest had been chafing him."

"Did you... do it?" Amy wasn't super sure she wanted to know.

"I'm his partner now, aren't I?"

"Oh..."

"Hell no I didn't do it." She shakes her softly. "We need you back, Amy."

The ceremony goes well. Captain Holt gives a nice speech about her, everyone claps, and afterward there's cake--a state of affairs that will never prove unpopular among New York's Finest. She's not ready to return yet, she knows, but will be one day. It's going to be a long night's journey but the moon is full overhead, spilling her light, and Amy Santiago believes that she might have just seen the first glimmers of dawn.


End file.
